Jonas Maebe schrieb:
> That's a non sequitur:
> a) even though the original code was written a long time ago, it has
been changed many times since then
> b) if it isn't broken, don't fix it. Example: changing all
occurrences of "string" into "shortstring" will break the system unit.
> The reason is that a "var a: string" is an "openstring" parameter
(with a hidden "high" parameter that tells you the size of
> the variable that was passed in), while "var a: shortstring" is not.
So at the very least, you'd have to change var/out
> parameters into openstring rather than into shortstring.
As far as I know you can pass ShortString of any size to a ShortString
of maximum length (255). So I don't see how "var a : ShortString" would
lead to errors. But of course, you need to be careful.
Nevertheless, I would rewrite such code. Even at the danger of breaking
something else (which would hopefully appear directly) I would consider
clear code so important that I would not rely on some compiler switch
(that may change some day) to make it run. Especially because *if* the
compiler switch is changed it would not strike you immediately. It would
run a long time until someone (by accident) has a path longer than 255
characters. And then it would not raise an exception (which would point
you to the cause) but it would overwrite other data and then crash at a
completely unrelated instruction (or just lead to wrong results).
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